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📝 Maya Angelou’s Writing Routine
"Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too."
Famous Writing Routines
January 22, 2024
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, widely regarded for her seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry.
Will I write a sentence that will just float off the page? Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
Maya Angelou started her writing career later in life than most people. The author-poet was around 30 years old when she moved to New York, at the urging of novelist John Oliver Killens, to concentrate on her writing. It was in New York that Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met authors like John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and published her first work.
But before her writing career took off, Angelou bounced around in several professions. She was a cook, she was a streetcar conductor, she was a waitress, she was a singer, she was a dancer, she was an editor, she was a teacher, she was a civil rights organiser, and she was an actress.
In her mind, it was those past professions that helped later in her writing career. “If I had not studied Latin in school, I wouldn’t have found it as easy to comprehend the structure of language,” she once told Harvard Business Review. “Had I not danced, I might never have really listened to music and known I could compose something.”
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